The Abstract Future
A new generation of artists is redefining contemporary abstraction by merging sculpture, painting, photography, and performance. Originating from an influential exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery, this book spotlights more than forty innovative artists who push the boundaries of process and materiality while exploring identity, culture, and politics through deeply personal and resonant narratives.
Building on California’s influential history of abstract art—from the Light and Space movement and Finish Fetish to the rise of geometric abstraction and conceptual art—these artists bring fresh perspectives to a long-standing creative lineage. Their work is shaped by a wide range of inspirations, including art-historical references, global events, environmental shifts, space exploration, and rapid advances in science and technology. Together, they demonstrate how abstraction can evolve in response to a rapidly changing world while remaining a powerful language for discovery and expression.
Featuring artists from Europe, South America, Africa, and across the United States, this volume presents a truly international view of abstraction today. This global lens underscores the continued relevance of abstract art as a method of inquiry and communication—one that transcends geography and offers insight into human experience across cultures, eras, and perspectives. The book reveals how the next wave of abstract artists is shaping the future of contemporary art, expanding what abstraction can be and what it can mean.
About the Authors: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. Alia Dahl is a curator and managing director of Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Suzanne Hudson is Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.
Rainbow Dreams
Rainbow Dreams is the ultimate visual treat: page after page of brilliant, rainbow-hued artworks by the world’s best-known contemporary artists.
From Takashi Murakami’s multicolored floral motifs and Yayoi Kusama’s vibrant polka dots to Ugo Rondinone’s neon sculptures and Paola Pivi’s playful feathered bear sculptures, the 200 featured artworks in this book offer a dizzying tour of the color spectrum.
Readers will discover art across a variety of mediums - paintings on canvas, monumental sculptures, LED light installations, immersive spaces, and more. Together, the works reveal how famed artists and creators perceive and experiment with color.
Featuring an exterior printed with a seamless rainbow gradient, Rainbow Dreams will bring joy, beauty, and wonder to anyone with an interest of art – and a burst of color to brighten any bookshelf.
Featured artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Nick Cave, Judy Chicago, Carlos Cruz-Diez, DRIFT, Olafur Eliasson, Katharina Grosse, Jennifer Guidi, Cai Guo-Qiang, Alex Israel, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, José Parla, Paola Pivi, Rob Pruitt, Sterling Ruby, Kenny Scharf, Frank Stella, Sarah Sze, and Mickalene Thomas.
Color Is A Beautiful Thing
Multi-disciplinary artist Alteronce Gumby is pleased to announce his first monograph, Color is a Beautiful Thing, published by Charles Moffett and False Flag Galleries. The book follows Gumby’s spring 2021 dual-site exhibition of new work at both galleries, Somewhere Under the Rainbow / The Sky is Blue and What am I.
The book acts as a survey of Gumby’s career from 2015 to 2021, touching on his longtime thematic considerations of how light, physics, natural energies and color can be contextualized into a larger societal conversation about race. Gumby’s work also includes social considerations pertaining to the spiritual practices native to the locations from which he sources the gemstones featured across his oeuvre. Also explored is the artist’s present-day elucidation of mid century geometric abstraction; Gumby appropriates the movement’s formal qualities while imbuing the work with themes and influences diametric to the reductive nature and prescribed forms of the midcentury canon.
The book features an essay by Guggenheim Curator Ashley James and an introductory interview conducted by Gagosian Director Antwaun Sargent.
Cross Colours
Bode Projects is pleased to present the solo exhibition ‘Cross Colours’ by the painter Alteronce Gumby. Alteronce Gumby is an abstract contemporary artist, working across different disciplines, expanding the pictorial language of his works and media.
Alteronce Gumby's paintings subvert traditional understandings of light and colour through the nuanced application of glass and oil paint on panel. The power of complimentary colours in the presented works refers to Joseph Albert’s Interaction of Colour, the colour theory of complimentary simultaneous contrast, where colours are pushing away from one to another. There is an optical illusion created in the unification of pigments, bleeding over from one over the other, and allowing the light and glass to refract those colours from one piece to the next. The glass panels consist of a push and pull action, when thinking about magnetic forces, gravity, pushing away, at the same time, bringing something together. Therefore an ‘otherness’ of language was created with a specific use of colours, Alteronce Gumby describes strong influences by Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wilhelm de Kooning, therefore using the interplay of contrast.
“Whether it is one force or another, by creation and destruction, stars explode, and the galaxy gives birth to new stars; there is a force of gravity which forms the planets. There is the same on earth; you have to crack eggs to make an omelette, I am approaching my studio practice with the same.”
– Alteronce Gumby
